5 Thoughts
The kinship2 package, on which tiny_pedigree is based, is likely very useful to people who handle complex problems involving pedigree information. It’s nice that it is possible to create a wrapper for kinship2 so that a non-specialist can use this package for simple problems without too much difficulty.
Having a pedigree display program in R is important. This allows an individual to stay within the R-universe and to integrate pedigree information with other tabular and visualization activities. kinship2 fills most of this requirement and this compatibility is inherited by tiny_pedigree. But there are some limitations.
5.1 Limitations
kinship2 was not built in the ggplot2 universe. Therefore, many of the useful features in ggplot2 are not available. For example, it’s not obvious how to modify the width of the lines in the plot. Therefore, all the connector lines are very thin without a way to make them wider.
This incompatibility extends to creating external graphics files.
It is hoped that some subsequent version of kinship2 will shift so it will fit into the data structures used in ggplot2. That would be a very handy simplification.
5.2 Gratitude
The authors of kinship2 and the contributors to the development of this package need to be thanked for their contribution. The authors are Jason P. Sinnwell, Terry M. Therneau, Elizabeth J. Atkinson, Daniel J. Schaid, and Carly Mester.
The R.devices package has turned out to be the “missing link” needed to get graphic output from kinship2 files. Thanks to Henrik Bengtsson for this great contribution to the R community.
5.3 Software Versions
kinship2(1.9.6)tidyverse(2.0.0)gt(0.9.0)R.devices(2.17.1)
The CRAN page for kinship2 is found at https://cran.r-project.org/package=kinship2.